Magnolia aldermen have taken disciplinary action against a city employee who allegedly was caught sleeping on the job in August while inmates he was assigned to keep an eye on during a work detail went unsupervised.
The board initially met Sept. 9 and voted to fire the employee, Willie Bowen, but worried that Mayor Melvin Harris would veto the decision.
Aldermen on Thursday rescinded the termination and instead voted 3-2 to suspend Bowens for 10 days, followed by a 90-day probationary period. Aldermen Mercedes Ricks, Lonnie Cox and Joe Cornacchione voted for the measure, while Becky Magee and Sharon Burton voted against it.
“He already wrote it up to veto,” Cox said of Harris. “They were stacking the deck against us, so it was our only option.”
The issue with Bowen stems from an Aug. 22 Enterprise-Journal article that described in detail an incident in which he was found sleeping in a city van for about 45 minutes while trusties roamed the area unsupervised.
A photo of Bowen lying in the van with his leg propped up on an ajar driver’s side door accompanied the photo.
The motion to suspend Bowen created some heated debate between him and the aldermen.
“No one has told me what’s going on,” Bowen said, addressing the board. “I’m beginning to wonder, is it my job or is it personal?”
The employee held the floor for much of the meeting until Cox stood up and delivered a stern response.
“If an employee falls asleep on any job for any company, he is immediately terminated,” Cox said.
Local NAACP official Anthony Witherspoon came to Bowens’ defense, arguing that aldermen have been holding illegal meetings.
“Anytime three or more aldermen get together and discuss city business, a quorum is met,” he said, alleging Cox, Ricks and Cornacchione had been doing just that.
Witherspoon said that because aldermen discussed the decision to suspend Bowen outside of a public forum, they were in violation of the state public meetings law.
City Attorney Wayne Dowdy, however, quickly shot back, saying that such discussion among aldermen outside of a public forum is permitted.
Bowen, nevertheless, kept pleading his case and insisting that he was never asleep in the van that day.
“That Enterprise-Journal article is a lie,” he said. “I never had my eyes closed. I was reading a newspaper.”
The city employee's last name is Bowen. The original version of the article misspelled it.
